


Between Monsters and Men

by Cupcakemolotov



Series: Dance with the Devil [44]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Caroline Makes A Deal, Dark Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson, F/M, Pre-Relationship, not Salvatore friendly, people die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 16:35:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18123767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cupcakemolotov/pseuds/Cupcakemolotov
Summary: When Klaus’ Hybrids attack her mom, Caroline draws a line.Klaus is happy to toe it.





	Between Monsters and Men

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I am taking massive liberties with this one because I don’t have the patience today to go digging through the TVD timeline to make sure that this works perfectly. Sorry Nonny, if this isn’t what you had in mind. 
> 
> Prompt: Sets in canon, somewhere over the time Klaus was in MF. Caroline chooses Klaus. MF gang does not agree. Chaos ensues.

The hospital room was quiet. In her lap, her fingers shook, the white knuckled grip on her shirt unable to hide trembling. There was still blood in her hair and beneath her fingernails, and for the first time Caroline felt no guilt in using compulsion. There were footsteps coming down the hall, measured and quiet against the strange tile of the hospital, and she pressed her lips tightly together. Her friend’s had already come by, and so had Tyler. There had been no apology for their choices that night. Instead there had been a litany of excuses spilling past lips while she had been told how things had gone so wrong. It had blurred into a long, endless drone of noise as she listened to each beep of a heart monitor.

She wasn’t as close to Elizabeth Forbes as she’d once been as a child. Her interactions with her mother since her vampirism could be best described as hostile. Caroline had weathered all of the hate and anger and suspicion, and had finally thought that maybe, just maybe, they were moving in a direction were they could rebuild. Perhaps it would have seemed naive, to love someone even when they hated what you had become, but Caroline had learned a long time ago to love someone even when they didn’t love her. But tonight that potential she had worked and slaved and tried to nurture had nearly been stolen from her.

“I hear she is expected to make a full recovery.”

Caroline didn’t look in his direction, her eyes never wavering from her mother’s unconscious face. She’d heard him of course, her vampire senses hyper focused as she waited for the tiniest sign of danger. The soft conversation he’d had with the nurses, the murmured compulsions sliding against her skin like a threat. There was nothing in his voice to give away his thoughts and Caroline didn’t know if his face would offer her more.

She didn’t know what it would mean if it did.

“Why are you here?” Caroline asked instead.

“Should I not be?”

She tilted her head then, and found his eyes on her. Always on her. At his mother’s ball, during their little date, the conversation on the bench. He watched her as if her expression, her words, were secrets the universe hadn’t yet told him. As if the smallest change of the angle of her chin would unravel all the answers to his questions.

“Your hybrids tried to kill my mother.”

The blood beneath her nails was from the one she’d ripped the heart out of when she’d found him looming over her bleeding mother. The blood in her hair was from Tyler’s grip as he tried to explain. It’d only been the sluggish, weak beating of her mother’s heart that had kept her from doing something immeasurably stupid as attacking them all.

Caroline didn’t care that it had been a simple case of wrong place, wrong time. She didn’t care that Damon and Stefan had come up with the plan to steal an artifact from the Council in the hope of using it against Klaus. She didn’t care that deals had been made with Esther and that Bonnie and Elena had been as horrified as she hoped. But still they only offered excuses. They _still_ tried to make her understand how it important it was to kill Klaus.

Klaus who hadn’t flinched away from the violence of her words.

“Would you like them dead, Caroline?”

She studied him, brows tucking together sharply, and his lips curled slightly into something that hinted at the monster beneath his skin.

“I can give that to you, if you’d like. I can peel away their skin from their bones, hang them from a butchers hook and carve away their flesh like prized meat until they curse the hybrid you killed for dying so quickly.”

There was no censure in his voice. His most sought after possession, the thing he’d wanted since before he’d broken his curse, and he’d handed her one on a silver platter and watched her with contained violence as she’d killed another. And he offered her the rest of his current collection like tiny trophies to soothe the violence under her skin.

Caroline hated him for it. That he saw so clearly beneath the facade she kept over her monster when no one else bothered to look. Turning back to her mom, she rubbed the dried blood of the dead hybrid between her fingertips. “Why?”

The rasp of her voice was thick with rage, but as always, nothing deterred him.

“Tyler is not as clever as he believes,” he said into the sterile room, words as casual and cool as hers had not been. Another day her heart would have pounded in her ears, terror gripping her chest as understood that he _knew_. Knew about the betrayals, the lies, the schemes. A hard laughed burbled in her throat, and her eyes never left vivid green lines moving up and down with her mother’s heart.

“I won’t help you kill my friends.”

Stop footsteps, hard rubber on tile. A warm fingertip pushed her bloody curl back behind her ear, the heat of him radiant in the cold air conditioning. “And who are those, love?”

There was an invisible ax hovering between them and it _would_ fall. Her words would guide it. Perhaps she could even render it useless if she begged. But tonight had damaged something inside her, had broken loose jagged pieces in her chest that had never quite healed. Her dad. Damon. Her mom’s rejection and the unease of Bonnie and Elena, and knotted and festered.

“Elena is mine,” Caroline said finally. Firmly. “Bonnie.”

Klaus moved so he was in front of her, hands braced on either side of her chair. His eyes were calculating, blue laced with wolf yellow. “Why?”

Her early question was repeated in a voice as smooth as silk, eyes as devouring as she’d come to expect. Head tilting, she counted each loud heartbeat in between her words. “And what would you do if I have you Elena, Klaus? Destroy your family? Rule the world? What does the hybrid army provide you that is so important?”

Klaus’ eyes turned completely gold, jaw tightening. “Be careful, sweetheart. I’m willing to make allowances, but you too have played your part in this little betrayal.”

Caroline lifted a shoulder in a shrug, unbending. “You deserved it.”

Instead of blinding rage, a hint of amusement crept into his eyes, but it was a dangerous indulgence. Something far sharper than his anger. “I’m sure Katerina felt I deserved her betrayal as well. I cannot imagine you wish to share her fate.”

“My mother almost died because of your games,” she said softly, words hard. “Why should I help you?”

His laugh was soft, mockening. “Games you played as well, Caroline. They do come with a price as you see. You’ve paid for your pretty smiles and flirty eyes, your perfect little distractions.”

“Leave my mother out of this.”

A quirk of his harsh mouth. “This is a debt will be settled between us. Not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but one day you will find yourself dealing with me, Caroline.”

Yes, she thought. They’d tangle one day, outside Mystic Falls, with no ruins of friendships between them and no ghosts of their mother’s so close. But not tonight.

“Here is my price for tonight’s work,” Klaus said softly. “One pint of doppelganger blood for each life saved.”

Caroline considered that. He’d leave the gathering to her, she knew. That would also be her price. But as her mothered breathed soft and slow next to her in that bed, as she recalled the tearful and false platitudes of her friend’s, she realized it was a price she’d pay to this devil.

“I’ll bring them by once my mom is well.”

Klaus went hard and still in front of her, a wolf hunting. His head tipped, curls falling across his forehead. “Will you?”

She held his eyes. “Bonnie and Elena. Two pints.”

The wolf was there, in the curve of his dimples, the arch of his brow as she handed him Damon and Stefan. As she gave him Tyler; all his hybrids.

Caroline wondered for a moment if she’d regret it, later. If she’d miss Stefan and his platitudes, if Elena’s grief would reach her broken chest as she bleed into a bag to save her own life. If Bonnie would hate her. She found she couldn’t care just yet. 

But Klaus.

Klaus smiled with the old rage and hunger that sat in his bones, delighted and terrible. He said nothing else as he left, leaving her in the sterile little room that smelled of old blood and her mom.

The sound of the heart monitor was loud.


End file.
